The job economy is about to get Ubered. If you’re not familiar with Uber, it’s a transportation company that is disrupting (displacing) the taxi cab market. Instead of calling a cab company, getting treated rudely, and then maybe getting a cab, you use your mobile phone to request a ride. You don’t have to talk to anyone. The…

If you’ve not heard of the concept of Basic Income, you should get familiar. It’s about to become a central topic within all modern societies. Key points The jobs are going away, and they’re not coming back. Any narrative that doesn’t convey this is either ignorant or deceitful. We keep adding people. Faster and faster. It’s accelerating. We…

So if you needed evidence that “free” markets, and lobbying, and the conservative right were a bad mix, your search has ended. Earlier this week Chris Christie moved to keep Tesla out of New Jersey, essentially because of lobbying by the car dealerships. And the same thing is true in Texas as well. Here you have two Republican…

Conservatives are known for their belief that free markets are the answer to all problems—including those like healthcare. The idea is elegant: you have a problem and you unleash the free market upon it. Companies will compete, and you’ll have the best outcomes. Done and done. It’s been intuitive to me that there is an inexorable conflict here,…

I think conservatives are fundamentally incorrect about what creates demand for products and services. Their claim is that those with money and businesses are the “job creators”, and that taxing them will harm the economy because they’ll be able to hire fewer people, grow their offerings less, etc. It makes sense if you don’t think about it. I…

Today I learned (from Scott Adams’ blog) that Donald Trump, during his last presidential run, proposed that we pay the national debt off all at once–with a massive tax on the rich. I don’t know the details, and they don’t really matter, but it was something like, “take 15% of the assets of those with the most money.…

I was reading the blogroll over at Overcoming Bias and, naturally, encountered quite a number of economics-focused blogs. What struck me was how overtly anti-Obama and anti-regulation they were. One after another they kept railing against regulation and government intervention designed to control human greed and stupidity. The answer was always the same: Let the market work! I…

A friend of mine (I’ll identify him if he so desires) sent me the following email: Just a quick thought. With Amazon hyping up the new Kindle so much, and with so many quality e-book readers available, why are Kindle edition books more expensive than the dead tree versions? There is no production cost beyond digitizing the media…

Here’s a clean little summary of Ayn Rand’s book, Atlas Shrugged, from this Wall Street Journal article: Politicians invariably respond to crises — that in most cases they themselves created — by spawning new government programs, laws and regulations. These, in turn, generate more havoc and poverty, which inspires the politicians to create more programs . . .…

I’m not an economist, but I read a lot. Here’s what happened: greed + stupidity. Greed on the part of the lenders, i.e. taking advantage of people who can’t read finance terms, and stupidity on the part of…people who can’t read finance terms. Here’s how it plays out: Greedy, immoral people loan stupid amounts of money to people…

Scott Adams just wrote an interesting piece about how he thinks economists have a unique way of seeing the world. First, he loosely defines an economist as someone who seeks explanations for why things happen. I like that, and it fits with my favorite economist’s view as well (Malcolm Gladwell).He then goes on to explain why economists are…